This meeting of the Saco City Council on July 21, 2026, began at 6:30 PM with two workshops. The first workshop provided a detailed statistical overview of the city's recent property reassessment, explaining the rationale, methodology, and impact on residents. The second workshop updated the council on the long-planned Smith-Stockman connector road project, presenting three options, including a no-build, drainage-only, and full build. The formal meeting included public comments, primarily from residents of Blue Haven Mobile Home Park advocating for a strong rent stabilization ordinance, the acceptance of Councilor Doyle's resignation, and the approval of several action items including a fee schedule correction and a Dyer Library funding request.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Sauco City Council meeting for Monday, July twentieth at six thirty PM. Before we call the official meeting to order, we do have two workshop items that we will be addressing first. The first item is an assessing overview, and with us we have Assessor Sean McCarthy. We're just here to give you uh an update on what's been happening in the assessing department and the values citywide. Um, what were the results of the vision measure and list that we completed about six months ago? Um how do we update the values? Why did we update the values and what does that mean for the future? Those are the big topics. And for the measure and list, we basically up here. Um for the measure and list, um the purpose of that was to go property to property and make sure that we had good data for each parcel. Um when people were home, they were able to talk to them when they were allowed in, they were able to go in and verify data that way. They took new photos of every property. When they weren't able to get in but felt like they needed to, they would send follow-up letters and go back. Um so having done this 18 month project gave us a good foundation to go ahead and um have solid a solid data foundation to start analyzing the sales and the market in SACO. Um that's what we've been doing. So a statistical update. Um there's a few pieces of information uh that I want to go over before we get into the the actual process, right? So a few terms. Sales ratio. What is a sales ratio? It's basically a measure of how close our assessments are to market rate, right? Usually expressed as a percentage. If you have a hundred thousand dollar property that sells for 80,000, or that we have assessed at 80,000, we would be at 80% of market value. Just simple math terms. Um it's a measure of accuracy. How accurate are we on our assessments? Um we use the average ratio across the city to uh determine the amount the state reimburses us for exemptions. If we fall too low, the state gives us less money and we have to factor homestead exemptions, veterans exemptions, a bunch of things across the city. So the state, the the law is 70% to 110% is the range you can be in and still be within compliance of the rules the state sets for us as assessors. If you drop below 91%, that's when the factoring of exemptions starts happening. There's also the quality rating. This is a measure of how far from the average ratio any given sale is. And in some neighborhoods, you'll have a lot of good data, some less so, right? So we start looking at it from all those different angles to try to find out where our weak points are. So we have like a test database. It's all of our data from the live database that I can go in and just start making changes and do crazy stuff, and it won't affect people's actual valuations that they pay their taxes on, right? So essentially we got those sales, we saw where we were at, I start making changes, we change something, look and see what it does to the data, analyze the results, and then repeat until we get to a place we're happy with, right? You may have noticed at no part in this, did I pull comps for a property? At no part in this, did I go in and drill down and start really analyzing the minute details of what makes this property unique? That is not what this is. That's not what the assessing department does. We do what's called mass appraisal, and this is how mass appraisal is performed. It is statistical analysis. When you're at the level, the size of the city of Sacco, you've got 400 sales in a year. We're not quibbling over a single sale necessarily. Now, there are cases where we might. We can get into that a little bit later. Now, this, the graph I'm sure you've seen on the screen, is a measure of all the ratios after I made the update of every single sale in our sample. And you'll notice the red line is the average. And it might be hard to see because it's a little small, but you'll notice at the left side of the graph, which is the oldest sales, it's about 95-ish, maybe a little higher.